A raft of election-related bills that died at the end of the 2023 legislative session will get another chance next year. Many of the bills are aimed at past practices in Harris County.
State Senator Paul Bettencourt (R-Houston) pre-filed seven bills that he said address "election integrity." Six of these passed the Senate last year but failed to pass the House by the end of the regular session.
The lead bill, reintroduced as Senate Bill 505, provides for countywide election audits by the state, with the prospect of the Secretary of State imposing an outside conservator to oversee future elections in the event the audit uncovers violations of state election law.
"Even with as well as the County Clerk is doing with elections here in Harris County, the reconciliation documents [show] that there's about 2,800 more votes than voters, and so these are things that you'd want to get explanations from, which is really what the audit bill is about," Bettencourt said.
SB 506 would prevent local governments from misleading voters with deceptive ballot proposition language.
"We've had, unfortunately, a lot of smaller municipalities take citizen-written initiatives and referendums and rewrite them for the ballot to where a ‘yes' means a ‘no' and a ‘no' means a ‘yes' to try to confuse the public," Bettencourt said.
SB 507 would increase penalties for failing to deliver election supplies — a response to shortages of ballot paper at Republican-leaning voting centers in Harris County during the 2022 general election.
"It should never happen again that, anywhere in the state, there would be 3 million sheets of ballot paper in a warehouse and not have that ballot paper in polls for voters to vote on without interruption anywhere in the state of Texas ever again," Bettencourt said.
SB 508 addresses situations where a county takes longer than 24 hours after the polls close to report election results, as occurred in Harris County during the March 2022 primary elections. The bill would allow the Secretary of State to step in and oversee the process of reporting election results when the county has failed to meet the 24-hour deadline.
SB 509 would require a county to notify the state Attorney General's Office, rather than just the Secretary of State's Office, if it files an action under the Texas Election Code seeking a court order to keep the polls open longer, as occurred in Harris County during the November 2022 general election.
SB 510 would allow the state to withhold payment for voter registrars for not doing their jobs. That could be used to penalize a registrar who fails to cancel voter registrations or respond quickly enough to challenges of voters' registrations.
The newest measure, SB 511, would ban local governments from using public funds to send out unsolicited voter registration cards. Harris County pursued a program along these lines in 2020 until the Texas Supreme Court intervened at the request of Attorney General Ken Paxton. During the 2024 election cycle, Paxton threatened to sue Bexar and Travis Counties for pursuing similar programs.
All seven of the bills come with multiple joint authors. Perhaps more importantly, the bills have the support of Senator Bryan Hughes (R-Mineola), chair of the Senate State Affairs Committee, which has jurisdiction over the legislation.
"Our goal for Texas elections is to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat," Hughes said in a statement unveiling the bills. "The Senate State Affairs Committee passed half a dozen of these good voter integrity bills in the 88th Texas Legislature, and they are highly likely to again get hearings in the 89th."
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